Lord Kames and the Making of Colonial Rule in the British West Indies

• In Event: Machiavelli, Locke, and Hume

Abstract

This paper will examine the influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) on the making of colonial rule in the British West Indies. A prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, Kames was a lawyer, philosopher, and conjectural historian who published Sketches on the History of Man in 1774, a text that provided a history of humanity stretching back to the origins of civil government. Conjectural history was a historiographical practice in which historians would theorize about the past according to a moralistic view of nature. While Kames shared many of the same philosophical beliefs as his contemporaries such as David Hume (1711-1776), he differed in his account of race and the history of civilization. Unlike Hume, who grounded ideas of race in climate, Kames believed racial differences were essentially species differences. Therefore, while it was, in some respects, a progressive endeavour as it presumed the universal equality of all humanity, conjectural history was also used to separate humanity into ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’. It has already been shown that histories of the British West Indies written by planters like Edward Long and Bryan Edwards were influenced by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Kames Sketches of the History of Man, however, has so far been neglected. This paper will delve deeper into the ways in which Kames’ heterodox theories on race and human nature were deployed in these histories that were explicitly meant to maintain slavery and colonial rule in the British West Indies.

Author

• William Tigner Holmes Little, Carleton University